Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending July 19, 2019

1. DUE DILIGENCE - PART TWO OF A FIVE PART SERIES. This five part series (over the next five weeks) covers how most VC's approach the quantitative part of doing diligence on potential investments. PART 2: REVENUE GROWTH (and the dreaded Churn!)
2. CAC PAYBACK: In the SaaS world, Cash is king. Understanding cash flow over time is critical and one of the most important metrics for cash is CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) payback. It’s the single best measure of efficiency. Here is a great deep dive from Open View on how to calculate it (and why it matters) with a complimentary article on how to drive that number down.
3. INFLUENCER MARKETING: From Business Insider we have a report on the power of influencers in Brand Marketing and Google provide handy insight on how to build a full-funnel influencer marketing campaign. To finish here is some crazy data on the amount of screen time influencers consume (it’s crazy high)
4. SHAPE UP: Another term for your tech dictionaries. Software product development requires innovative strategies based on todays cadence expectations of continuous integration, micro-services, feature delivery, and scale. The team at Basecamp (I’m an old school fan) have developed ShapeUp, their publications and toolbox of techniques designed to eliminate chaos when it comes to designing, prioritizing and shipping product/features.
5. BOARD: Anu Hariharan shares some collective wisdom on best practices in managing a board (including running board meetings and overcoming board issues).
6. LIFECYCLE: A really great article (and PDF) on understanding the the SaaS customer lifecycle from CoBloom and the stages within the acquisition, engagement and retention phases.
7. sCOMMERCE: Not really a thing yet for your dictionaries yet as I just made the term up. But it stands for Social Commerce. Here is a Business Insider report on Social Commerce. Little teaser fact: The US social commerce market will be worth $22 billion in 2019 and soar to $84.2 billion by 2024.
8. AI: How many Artificial Intelligence projects do you currently have underway? Well according to Gartner, organizations working with artificial intelligence and machine learning have an average of four projects currently in place, and plan to add 15 more within the next three years (and have 35 in total). Revenues from the AI market worldwide are expected to hit $118.6 billion USD by 2025 according to Statista/Tractica.
9. MMM: Another acronym! This one means Marketing Mix Modeling. This method helps measure the impact of efforts across different channels, and it’s a crucial tool for guiding budget decisions. Google break it down as a step by step guide for digital/media/video efforts.
10. SPACE TECH: Who are the biggest VC Investors in Space Tech? PitchBook take a look.

 
POD OF THE WEEK:  From Y-Combinator. A short and sweet (sub 2 minute) snippet of what successful Founders choose to focus on.  

BONUS: This one is a hilarious Chrome Extension featured on Product Hunt called Netflix Hangouts. It basically disguises Netflix in a fake four-person conference call. Such a terrible idea!